GARDENS REIGN ATOP HILL IN BRENGLE TERRACE

Plans in works for additional features at Alta Vista, including a more visible donation box

Celebration at the gardens

Alta Vista Gardens hopes to attract people to the top of its Brengle Terrace hill March 18 to celebrate a new sculpture garden. The event will feature a guided nature and sculpture walk a 2 p.m., a musical performance at 3 p.m. from the Stefani Stevens Band, accompanied by dancing, and an American drum circle at 5 p.m. Admission is $5 and includes a drink.

“Right now I’m just happy to have people come,” Morse said. “It’s like my life mission to make botanical gardens. It’s what I need to do.”

Alta Vista Gardens is his second stint into this calling. The first was the Pikake Gardens in Valley Center.

The cylindrical collection box with a sign saying “Stop” and “Pay here” are easy to miss, nestled in the rocks and plants beneath a canopy of eucalyptus branches near the entrance. It collects about $25 a week, Morse said, less than it costs to order and install it.

Steps away from the entrance is the Children’s Garden, which includes a marimba-like instrument, a whale drum and a tuned instrument that looks like a massive Connect Four game, played by dropping pebbles into the holes.

“It’s one of the last free things to do in North County,” said Claire Hyde while visiting the garden with her baby, Layla, on her back and her 21/2-old daughter, Lydia. “Well, it’s a $2 donation when you come in, but you can be here for hours and pack a lunch.”

Lydia lay face down in pebbles while her mother talked about the garden.

“It’s really one of the only places in Vista where you can take your toddler and let them run around and not really worry about it,” Hyde said. “(Lydia) just likes to discover the trails, swim in the pebbles. It’s not a good day unless you go home from here filthy.”

Sculptures are mixed in with the plants in the 14-acre garden, because they belong together, Morse said.

Alta Vista’s Mission is to bring together people, nature and art.

Morse, who goes barefoot in the garden “to connect with the soil,” points to an unlikely little plant, which resembles a tropical version of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, as perhaps the garden’s most rare: the wollemi pine. It’s genetically identical to its plant ancestors from when dinosaurs roamed the earth 200 million years ago, he said.

Mustard weeds line the paths, reflecting Morse’s plan to undermaintain rather than overmaintain, “so it just feels right.”

Everything at Alta Vista Gardens is done naturally, Morse said.

“Here, we’re totally organic,” he said. “We’re a nature habitat. We don’t use any chemicals at all. We don’t use any bug spray. We don’t use fertilizers unless they’re 100 percent organic. Everything is done that way. That’s why we have more hummingbirds and more butterflies and more ladybugs and everything else. The nature is coming to the place.”

The gardens are also home to a bustling rabbit population, which Morse speculates is probably what attracted the coyote family that are regulars at Alta Vista.

The cactus garden, still strewed with sandbags to prevent erosion, is one of Alta Vista’s new features, and one of Morse’s many touches since taking over 18 months ago. Others include the Jungle Shade Garden, the Cycad Garden, the Labyrinth Garden, a Culinary Herb Garden and the Garden Pond.

And he’s not stopping.

“I’m driven like a crazy person,” he said.

Morse plans to expand the garden’s pond system to have water cascade down a hill, stopping at an existing goldfish pond before ending at a tropical lake. He also hopes to add soon a South African garden, Pan Asian garden and a conifer fern garden, among others.

By the time that happens, Morse wants to have installed a more visible entry fee collection kiosk.

Alta Vista gardens leases from the city the land atop the hills at Brengle Terrace Park for $1 a year.

The garden operates on dues from its 150 members, donated plants and materials and revenue from a pair of cell towers on-site.